Legal Research

Quotations From Chairman? Everyone

By Simon Fodden

Google News has added a quotation feature. According to the Google News Blog, entering a person’s name into the News search box will bring up a recent quote above the search results — provided, of course, that person has been quoted by an indexed news source. If you then click on the highlighted name of the person (beside the lead quote) you’ll go to a page full of quotes from that speaker.

Here, for instance, is a bit from the 117 quotations from Stephen Harper:

It seems that Google News can recognize a person’s name. At least, a search for quotes by “the judge” turned up nothing, even though there were instances where “the judge said, ‘blahblah’” etc. Ditto for “an unidentified source.” And for “the chairman,” by the way. (I thought that “‘He?s not for sale and we won?t be entertaining approaches,? the chairman said.” was a useful quote and very much the sort of thing I’d like the chairman to say.)

It’s not clear what the point of all of this is, other than letting us troll for a bit of fun. And, perhaps, to show us again, if we’d forgotten, that almost any patch of uttered prose can seem portentous when standing alone and set off by quotation marks.

Enjoy.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on April 17, 2008 (boomark / email).